Kasparov: Need to Recognize the ‘Inevitability of Machines’ Taking Jobs, ‘It’s Called Progress’

Russian chess grandmaster and former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov claimed people need to embrace the replacement of jobs by robots and start focusing on tasks that they can’t perform.

“We have to start recognizing inevitability of machines taking over more and more tasks that we used to do in the past. It’s called progress,” Kasparov declared in an interview with the BBC. “Machines replace farm animals, and almost all forms of manual labor, and now machines are about to take over more menial parts of cognition. Big deal. So it’s happening and we should not be alarmed about it, we should just take it as a fact, and look into the future trying to understand ‘how can we adjust?’.”

“Future is a self-fulfilled prophecy. If we’re negative, something wrong will happen,” he continued. “I’m not telling you that if we’re positive it will get avoided, but at least we have a chance to determine in that venture. When people say we don’t know what’s going to happen next, fantastic. That’s exactly the reason for us to move there because ‘we don’t know’, that was one of the main driving forces in history of humanity.”

In 1997, Kasparov became the first World Chess Champion to lose to a machine, after his defeat to the Deep Blue IBM supercomputer.

“Everything we do, and we know how we do, machines will do better eventually,” explained Kasparov. “But there’s so many things we don’t know how we do, and let’s concentrate on that, because machines have algorithms and they’re getting better and better, but machines have no curiosity, no passion, and most of all, machines don’t have purpose.”

“If we look back forty, fifty years, we realized there were so many great things we could do and we actually were involved, like space exploration, or deep ocean exploration,” he concluded. “We stopped, because it was too risky. Now with this massive power that A.I. brings to the table, maybe we should start doing it again. It’s all about new challenges, it’s all about new horizons.”